You take a quarter out of your pocket and idly start flipping it in the air. Fifty flips in a row and it comes up tails. Amazing. Unbelievable. Assuming it’s a legitimate coin, what is the probability that the next flip will come up heads? Seems as though the odds of a head ought to be high, doesn’t it? On the next flip it rolls behind a kitchen cabinet. You go on with your life.
A hundred years later your great-granddaughter is remodeling the kitchen and finds the quarter. She flips the coin. What are the odds that the quarter will turn up heads? She, of course,assumes an even chance for heads or tails. So where did your perceived probability it is more likely be a heads go.
Does the increased probability somehow belong just to you? Maybe it’s stored in the coin? Maybe there’s an invisible field in the universe that stores luck. Maybe the magic just fades away with time. Maybe if she had heard the story of, ‘The Amazing Coin and the Fifty Tails in a Row’ just knowing the story would restore the probability of a heads on the next flip.
The answer, of course, is that the probability of getting a head on the twenty-six flip is 50% just like it was on the twenty-five flips 100 years ago (again assuming a perfectly balanced coin). It’s the same with all games of chance. But what about everyday events. Things happen to people all the time that seem to defy all probability.
Consider a class of thirty twelve-year-old normal every-day kids. What are the odds that two of them have the same birthday? It’s more probable than you might think. There is a 79.6% chance that two kids out of thirty will have the same birthday. And there is still a 50% chance, even odds, that two students out of only twenty-three will have the same birthday. That seems contrary to common sense. Right? There are 365 days in a year. How can this be true? But it can be proven mathematically. If you’re interested in the math go to: https://medium.com/i-math/the-birthday-problem-307f31a9ac6f.
Clearly when it comes to probability, we can’t trust commonsense; Las Vegas counts on that. For the best poker players, knowing the probabilities of a game like Texas Holdem, for instance, becomes second-nature; it has to be. They are constantly reading the other players, trying to mathematically calculate the odds in their heads at the same time equals…. ‘loser’.
What about strange improbable events in our daily lives? Improbable things seem to happen all the time. But the truth is that they only ‘seem’ to be improbable because that is the way we perceive them.
Every morning you get up and toast a piece of bread. One morning the toast pops up and amazingly there’s an image of Elvis Presley on it. Wow. You post it on Facebook, and it goes viral. A week later you’re on television. Soon you start to receive offers to buy it. So, you put it up on eBay and it sells for $10,000 dollars. The buyer preserves and mounts it in a golden frame in his vast art collection. Amazing.
Consider, on any given day, around the world, many billions of pieces of bread are toasted; let’s say 10 billion. Multiply that by 365 days a year and, again by the over 60 years that Elvis has been famous. That works out to around 22 million–billion pieces of toast. That is the number of opportunities for at least one piece of toast to show up looking like Elvis. Thinking about it that way gives us a whole different perspective. The probability of it happening once might be one in 100 billion but in 60 years there will be 220 thousand one–in–a–billion opportunities. It will probably happen several times and no one will notice.
There will be that one time that someone will notice. I know that I would notice. If I did, do you think that I would let a knowledge of probabilities stop me from selling that thing on eBay? Not likely.
If it was a religious image many people would see it as a sign, and it would take on a miraculous nature. People might visit the toast, maybe even praying to the toast — hoping to be cured of some illness. This is called ‘Magical Thinking’. We now know that there is nothingmagical about it. Just as we know that there were 22 million-billion chances that the image of Elvis would show up on a piece of toast in the last 60 years.
How many chances for an image of the Buddha, who has been around for over 2,500 years, to show up in a water stain on a monastery wall for instance. When it happens it only stands out because it is unique. The more unique and miraculous something seems ‘after the fact’ the more it will be shared and the more it’s shared the more miraculous it seems. No one points out the trillions of stains that don’t look like theBuddha that came before it. Predicting that there will be a picture of the Buddha in a water stain before the rain storm would be a completely different story. That’s something I’d like to see.
There is probably over a 99% percent chance that the image on your piece of toast will look like a blob; unless you have a really good imagination. No one is going to go on Facebook with a piece of toast with a picture of a blob on it. Well, nowadays, I can’t say that for sure. Surely, no one would pay $10,000 dollars for a piece of toast with a picture of a blob on it. Well, I guess I can’t say that either. I guess the moral of this story is, ‘Even if the image burned into your toast looks like a blob — you never know.’ Someone might pay you a lot of money for it. I’m joking.
You see; everything that happens is possible or it wouldn’t happen. Therefore, everything that happens must have a probability of happening. And no matter how improbable it is, if it’s possible, and there are enough opportunities for it to happen — it will probably happen — even a picture of Elvis burnt onto a piece of toast.
By Tim Shively, May 8, 2019